Cisco launches support for DiffServe

Cisco Systems, a longtime supporter of mulitprotocol label switching, will announce tomorrow that it is introducing a new set of software that supports differentiated services (DiffServe)-aware traffic engineering.

Under the term MPLS Guaranteed Bandwidth Services, the company is releasing software that lets service providers offer voice and data services with point-to-point to guarantees. The end result is a set of software that allows service providers to increase network resiliency and optimize bandwidth through a variety of network traffic classes that could support a service level agreement.

Under the new program, Cisco is supporting both Integrated Services (IntServ) and DiffServ architectures, as defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force. Previously, Cisco’s MPLS had allowed traffic engineering capabilities but did not fully support DiffServe.

“With cueing algorithms and traffic shaping and traffic conditioning available on IOS, we’ve actually had diff serve-type deployments,” said Azhar Sayeed, manager of product management, MPLS and QoS for Cisco’s IOS Technologies division. “What we’re adding is the full support for diff service, the ability to do classification and marking.”

As part of the suite, Cisco is offering a series of tools including QoS Device Manager, QoS Policy Manager, Cisco Internet Performance Monitor and Cisco Service Management Solution.